Page:How and what to grow in a kitchen garden of one acre (IA howwhattogrowin00darl).pdf/110

 method is now only practiced to save labor in small gardens and to bring a few onions in for use early in the season.

To raise a satisfactory crop the ground must be free from weed seeds; it must be made as rich as possible and have constant cultivation from the time the seedlings break through the ground until the bulbs begin to ripen. The soil must be plowed, harrowed and raked, until it is in the finest possible condition to receive the seed, and it is important to select a plot for this purpose that has been kept free from weeds the preceding season. Root crops are the best to precede onions, as they not only leave the ground free from litter, but also, if they have been properly cultivated, leave the soil in fine tilth.

In our kitchen garden I would sow the seed in drills, twelve to fourteen inches apart, and cultivate with the wheel hoe; in field culture, or raised more extensively in the garden, plant in rows as closely as they can be worked with the cultivator, which, if it is provided with very narrow-bladed teeth, can be run through any rows where the horse can walk. For the kitchen garden, make the surface fine with a sharp steel rake, and if no drill is at hand, take a rake handle or blunt stick, and, drawing it along the garden line, scratch a drill about an inch deep. Sow the seed thinly, say an inch apart, but if there is reason to doubt the freshness of the seed, sow it thicker, so that a good stand may be assured. When the onions are an inch high, they should have their first working. Follow the wheel hoe or cultivator with a narrow-bladed hoe, not wider than an inch